![]() This is far less true of other Safdie leads: New Yorkers to the core whose strengths and flaws seem inseparable from that city’s spiritual vibrations and social manners, and whose manic-depressive tangents and crash landings might be said to have a more universal resonance, conjuring up messes that we all have some recognizable part in stirring up as well as suffering from. Though I find the results believable enough as an account of lost souls, these junkies for me lack the charisma of other Safdie protagonists - meaning that the messes they create seem to be almost entirely their own, at least as the film depicts them. The latter took shape after Josh Safdie, doing research on Manhattan’s Diamond District for Uncut Gems, encountered Arielle Holmes as a panhandler, and eventually got her to write and star in her own beleaguered story - anticipating the casting of basketball star Kevin Garnett and pop star The Weeknd, both playing themselves, in Uncut Gems. Less persuasive, at least to me, are the young junkies, both female and male, playing themselves in the 2014 Safdie opus Heaven Knows What. This dizzying pattern seems to culminate in their new film Uncut Gems, which registers at times as a slapstick remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) - at least if one can allow for a substitution of a certain amount of manic Jewish optimism for depressive Catholic despair. They exasperate their colleagues, spouses, and other family members, who almost invariably wind up forgiving these crumb-bums for their lies and deceptions after hearing their shame-faced apologies, which are typically followed by further deceptions. ![]() Maybe because these scheming and prevaricating characters know how to tell lies and (somewhat less often) how to apologize for or cover up their various messes, they also qualify, at least some of the time, as skillful escape artists as well as stylish con men. The movies of Josh and Benny Safdie are dominated by compulsively impulsive hustlers who continuously revise their own lives as well as those of everyone else in their immediate vicinities, most often with chaotically disastrous consequences for everyone concerned. “Would you forgive me if I die?” - Question asked in the first scene of Heaven Knows What Commissioned and published by New York’s Metrograph Chronicle in mid-December 2019.
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